I need something to record videos that doesn't take away 75% of your frame rate. Sadly FRAPS isn't it.

you need an i5 or i7 badly dude that E8400 is whats hurting your framerate when recording. I used to game on a AMD X2 4200+ and it was always a slide show when I enabled recording on that system back in the day.

I need something to record videos that doesn't take away 75% of your frame rate. Sadly FRAPS isn't it.

2 main things that hurt FRAPs performance:

1) CPU speed: FRAPs will peg a single core on a Core 2 CPU @ 100%, so a Quad will help tremendously with CPU utilization. I believe they've reduced CPU overhead over the various releases, but on my Core 2 E6400 @ 3.0GHz CPU utilization went from 50% to 100% with FRAPs. Q6600 and i7 helped tremendously but you may still notice the performance hit in very CPU intensive games that use all 4 cores.

2) HDD speed: FRAPs records nearly uncompressed video and synchronizes frame rates to recorded frames, so if you're trying to capture 1080p @ 60Hz its incredibly write intensive and will drop FPS significantly if your HDDs can't keep up. I've done the math before and its easy to see the bitrate of recording @ 1080p far exceeds the sequential write speeds of traditional mechanical HDDs. You'll see much better FPS and smoother recording by going with multiple drives in RAID 0. With 3x1TB Seagate 7200.12 in RAID 0 with ~280MB/s sequential write speed, I'm able to record 1080p @ 60FPS smoothly, with stereo 3D (2x1080p @ 60FPS) its only ~40FPS.

You can drop quality to half or reduce gaming resolution to try and keep 60FPS, or if you're willing to play at lower FPS while recording, drop how many frames you record to smooth things out. If you want to try and keep everything maxed out and 60FPS then you'll have to get faster storage. I don't recommend using SSDs as their sequential writes speeds aren't much better than 2xHDDs in RAID 0 and writing will wear down SSDs faster. SSDs are also way too small still and FRAPs videos are massive, a 4GB fraps clip is only ~1 minute of 1080p @ 60FPS.

There's probably better options now to record video, the main benefit of FRAPs is quality but compressing it and managing it can be a pain with such large uncompressed files.

Yeah dropping resolution helps a lot, I remember being in shock when "Full HD" panels came into their own and I went from 1280x1024 to 1920x1200 and wondered why I suddenly couldn't record with FRAPs anymore without destroying my FPS lol. Then I started looking at the various bitrates and upgrading bit by bit to the point I can finally record full 1080p @ 60FPS without any slowdowns, but now 2x1080p in 3D Vision is the problem.

But ya if you upgrade to a Quad also make sure to run at least 2xHDDs in RAID 0 for recording, ideally on their own path like a storage or scratch disk and not conflicting with your OS or game drive. Right now I run SSD for OS and apps, 2xWD in RAID 0 for games, and 3xSeagate in RAID 0 for storage and FRAPs scratch along with an external for backups and OS images.